When comparing BitTorrent vs Rtorrent, the Slant community recommends Rtorrent for most people. In the question“What are the best Torrent clients?”Rtorrent is ranked 6th while BitTorrent is ranked 18th.

Pros

Pro

Clean and easy to navigate user interface

A clean, visually-appealing interface that’s incredibly simple to navigate and cuts down on clutter by allowing unwanted elements to be hidden.

Pro

Additional features with the purchase of BitTorrent Pro

If you pay $19.99, you will get features such as removal of advertisements and added support for an internal HD media player.

Pro

Full-featured

BitTorrent covers basics such as Prioritization, Selective Downloading, DHT, PEX, LPD and Magnet URIs as well as Broadcatching, Sequential downloading and Search. It includes MSE/PE for security. It has graphical and web interfaces. Has UPnP, NAT-PMP, NAT traversal for automatic router configuration. Has UDP tracker and µTP data transfer protocol support. Even covers IPv6, web seeding, Embedded tracker, Super-seeding and proxy servers. And it auto-updates.

Pro

Supports thousands of torrents easily

Pro

RUTorrent is a great web interface for RTorrent

Pro

Reasonable feature set

rTorrent covers basics such as Prioritization, Selective Downloading, DHT, PEX and Magnet URIs. It includes MSE/PE for security. It has graphical and command line interfaces. Has UDP tracker and µTP data transfer protocol support. Even covers Super-seeding.

Pro

CLI interface

Pro

No extraneous functions

Torrent is a CLEAN client. Meaning there’s no search engine, tools, or other things to bloat the program.

Cons

Con

No tracker exchange

Tracker exchange functionality allows peers to exchange information about trackers of a given file. It is another way of ensuring that the file is downloaded from the optimal source. BitTorrent lacks this functionality.

Con

Proprietary

No source code is publicly available. As such there's no way to independently check what security and privacy features are implemented and how as well as whether there's any malicious code or not.

Con

No IPv6 support

Con

Requires manual router configuration

The client lacks support UPnP, NAT-PMP or NAT traversal for automatic router configuration.

Con

No proxy server support

Con

Lacks µTP transfer protocol support

Con

No tracker exchange

Tracker exchange functionality allows peers to exchange information about trackers of a given file. It is another way of ensuring that the file is downloaded from the optimal source. rTorrent lacks this functionality.

Con

No search

Con

No embedded tracker

An embedded tracker allows turning the client into a server offering an easy way of sharing files with others. rTorrent lacks embedded tracker support so another method of sharing or different client has to be used to share files.

Con

No web seeding

Web seeding support allows downloading file parts from an HTTP source alongside the swarm. It's usually used for long-term seeding and easing some of the load on web hosts that supply direct downloads by offering a BitTorrent download as an alternative while still ensuring that the file is always available in its entirety regardless of the swarm. rTorrent lacks this functionality.